Author Archives: Eann Patterson

Science fiction becomes virtual reality

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vecI have a new print in my office. It’s called ‘Small Science Fiction Self-Portrait’ and is by Maria Lassnig (1919-2014) [see: http://www.painters-table.com/link/contemporary-art-daily/maria-lassnig]. I am disappointed to admit that I had never heard of her until I went to a special exhibition at the Tate Liverpool a few weeks ago, which featured her work and that of Francis Bacon. I was expecting the works by Bacon to be the main attraction but instead I thought Lassnig ‘stole the show’. Nearly all of her paintings in the exhibition were self-portraits in which she attempts to represent on canvas her ‘body sensation’ or ‘body awareness’. This seems to echo the synaesthesia pursued by Georgia O’Keeffe when she represented her feelings from various senses in her paintings [see my post entitled ‘Engineering Synaesthesia‘ on September 21st, 2016].  Two of Lassnig’s paintings resonanted with me: one, which was on the front of the programme, called Lady with Brain was painted in 1991 and shows the head of a lady with a proportion of her brain outside of her skull – not in a damaged way but as if it had grown there. This reminded me of the ideas on our increasing use of out-of-skull memory and processing power in our mobile devices that I wrote about under the heading ‘Thinking out of Skull’ [see my post of that title on March 18th, 2015]. The second is the print in my office, painted in 1995, that shows the artist wearing a virtual reality headset that looks almost identical to those we use in our Virtual Engineering Centre. I was amazed by Lassnig’s vision.

Revisiting closed systems in nature

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milkywayNASA

It is the beginning of the academic year and once again I am teaching introductory thermodynamics to engineering undergraduate students and my MOOC entitled ‘Energy: Thermodynamics in Everyday Life‘ is running in parallel.  Last week after my lecture on thermodynamic systems, a student approached me to ask whether the universe is a closed and isolated system.  It’s an interesting question and the answer is depends on the definition of universe.   In thermodynamics, we usually define a boundary to delineate the system of interest as everything inside the boundary and everything else are the surroundings.  The system and surroundings taken together are the universe (see my post ‘No beginning or end‘ on February 24th, 2016).  If the universe is defined as the system then there are no surroundings; hence the system cannot exchange energy or matter with anything which is the definition of a closed and isolated system.

Physicists often refer to the observable universe, or define the universe as everything we can observe.  We are aware that we cannot observe everything.  Hence, it is reasonable to suppose that the observable universe exchanges energy and matter with the unobservable space beyond it, in which case the observable universe is an open system.  We could also consider the concept that we are part of multiverse and our universe is only one of many, in which case it seems likely that is not isolated, i.e. it can exchange energy, and perhaps it is open, i.e. it can exchange both energy and matter with other parts of the multiverse.

This is not really thermodynamics in everyday life.  However, the occurrence of closed systems in nature appears to interest a lot of people to judge from the visits to my previous posts on this topic.  See ‘Closed Systems in Nature?‘ on  December 12th, 2012; Is Earth a closed system? Does it matter? on December 10th, 2014; and ‘No Closed Systems in Nature‘ on August 12th, 2015. For more about system boundaries, see my post entitled ‘Drawing Boundaries‘ on December 19th, 2012.

Art and engineering

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Windows of the Soul II [3D video art installation: http://www.haigallery.com/sonia-falcone/]

Windows of the Soul II [3D video art installation: http://www.haigallery.com/sonia-falcone/%5D

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the meaning of the words ‘engineer’ and ‘engineering’ [see my post entitled ‘Engineering is all about ingenuity‘ on September 14th, 2016] .  And it was clear that most engineers are involved in some sort of creative activity.  One of the common skills that unites the many different types of engineering is creative problem-solving.  But in that case how are engineers different from artists who are also involved in creative acts?  David Blockley summarises it succinctly as engineers produce something useful and artists produce something extraordinary.  Of course, very occasionally we manage to do both and an artist-engineer produces something extraordinary that is also useful.  I say ‘very occasionally’ because extraordinary implies it is exceptional, which eliminates mass-produced artifacts. It is difficult to identify modern creations that fit this description – the Large Hadron Collider is an extraordinary piece of engineering but is it art?  It is a product of the application of human skill and imagination, which is another definition of art.  Or the Solar Impulse – the solar powered plane that flew around the world?

On the other hand, when we visit art galleries we can buy prints and postcards that are copies of the artworks displayed in the gallery. Is the mass-produced, but iconic, engineering artifact equivalent to an art print? Perhaps the original has to be rather less transitory than the latest model of phone or car.  The advent of computer-aided engineering and rapid prototyping means that the original often only exists in virtual space, which is more equivalent to the video installations that are becoming more commonplace in galleries, such as Sonia Falcone’s ‘Best Video Installation Art at the Biennale in Santa Cruz Bolivia‘.

Engineering synaesthesia

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A street in Sante Fe

A street in Sante Fe

One of the most memorable places we visited when we lived in the United States was Sante Fe, New Mexico.  We rented a house on a hillside that was walking distance from downtown.  The landscape is stark, vast and vivid all at the same time.  Georgia O’Keeffe captured it beautifully in her paintings.  In our house in Liverpool, we have a number of prints from her paintings that we bought during a visit to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Sante Fe about ten years ago. So it was a nostalgic experience to visit the O’Keeffe exhibition at the Tate Modern in London a few weeks ago and reacquaint ourselves with familiar originals as well as enjoy paintings we had not seen before. ‘Red and Yellow Cliffs‘ (1940) was one of my favourites in the exhibition which was reminiscent of many of the landscapes in New Mexico.  I also enjoyed the room entitled ‘Abstraction and the Senses’ that contained a series of paintings in which O’Keeffe took inspiration from sensory stimulation and expressed in her paintings the feelings induced by ‘signals’ from senses other than sight, such as hearing music.  This is known as synaesthesia: ‘the production of a sense impression relating to one sense or part of the body by stimulation of another sense or part of the body’, according the Oxford Online Dictionary.  Some people suffer from synaesthesia and hearing particular sounds might trigger a sensation of taste, or letters might be associated with colours, for instance ‘A’ with red. It can be very useful, for instance I ‘see’ numbers laid out in patterns and so can perform mental arithmetic pictorially.

Engineers make use of similar phenomena to visualize patterns of variables that are invisible.  For instance, moiré interferometry uses the interference between regular arrays of lines to magnify tiny differences in the arrays and generate visible fringe patterns – this is useful in comparing the dimensions of two objects to which the arrays are attached.  In photoelasticity, polarised light is used to generate colour fringe patterns that are contours of stress in transparent components or models of components [see my post entitled ‘Art and Experimental Mechanics‘ on July 12th, 2012].  Unfortunately this elegant, but analogue, technique has been almost completely usurped by digital analysis using computers. Many of these computers have a touch screen that convert your thoughts, conveyed by the tap or swipe of your fingers, into text or commands for devices attached physically or wirelessly to the computer. And, virtual reality goggles, head sets and haptic devices allow the computer to reverse the process by transmitting signals to our senses, which often confuse us as they become intermingled in a new form of synaesthesia.  Georgia O’Keeffe died in 1986 at the age of 98 and so missed out on this aspect of the digital revolution but it might have generated a whole series of beautiful paintings.

Sources:

http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/synaesthesia/Pages/Introduction.aspx